Treasures that scientists keep on ice

Posts Tagged ‘life/death’

A thread that has run through my various rants on this blog, usually more implicitly than explicitly, has been blame. Who or what is to blame for something undesirable? Blame is another name for causation (of a negative outcome). As conscious beings we’re drawn to find that causation and attribute it to agents, be they gods/spirits/the universe, governments, corporations, CEOs, supervisors, friends or ourselves. In my mid-forties I’ve become better at watching myself for situations involving blame/causation and pause when entering them, because everyone’s unconscious bias often is to seek very simple scenarios of blame. But, much as we’re trained as scientists to find parsimonious conclusions, Occam’s razor can balance a very complex scenario on its knife-edge when reality is indeed very complex. And the point of this post is to explore how that complexity is often very real, but that needn’t be stifling. That’s probably bloody obvious to everyone but maybe the exploration will be interesting—or at least, for me, cathartic.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 0/10- or blame me. I’m at best an amateur philosopher and psychologist!

I feel that a big part of my job as a responsible human, adult, parent, supervisor, colleague, scientist, etc. is to blame myself when I deserve it. “Responsible” encompasses that ability to attribute blame/causation correctly. I find that blaming myself comes easier now that I’m battle-scarred and wiser for it, and I am more able to watch for excessive self-blame and paralytic pummelling than I was when I was younger. Low self esteem makes it easier to find the simple solution that you’re entirely to blame, or that simply someone else is. Excessive self confidence/power makes it easier to deny personal culpability or hunker down until it blows over. Balance is hardest– and I fail all the time.

I’ve been in many situations, ranging from the more micro-scale (smaller, embarrassing/silly events) to more traumatic (e.g. long-term arguments, correction/retraction of papers), in which I’ve had to consider blame or something like it. Foremost in my mind are my health problems and personal relationships. I’ve explored some of those here before and there are others I’d love to write about publicly but, no.

Yet lately it seems that blame is everywhere; the “blame culture” we hear about. Watch the news and virtually every story is about blame. Blame is a symptom of an angry world. It can be informative (or even a fun game) to think over who/what is not blamed in those stories (a simpler narrative is convenient, or propaganda and/or paranoia). We should be looking inwards at those we don’t want to blame, too.

There are many ways to confront the issue of blame. On one side we can say “don’t sweat the small stuff—and it’s all small stuff”. I hate that shit. “Happy happy joy joy” and all that; Voltaire rotates in his crypt. To me, that attitude also means “existence is meaningless” and “we are utterly powerless and blameless”, which is in contradiction to my experience and philosophy. On another side we can try to micromanage everything around us (small and big stuff), dissecting all the levels of blame in every situation, and we’d go/be insane. A middle ground approach within this spectrum, as usual, is best. Don’t be ashamed of that blame; it’s a thing we can tame.

Purpose and meaning in existence are chosen based on the direction we want our life to go (and how our successors look back on it postmortem). We place blame on those causative agents that push us away from that vector, and credit those that aid us. The more neutral agents are harder to grasp (e.g. the indifference of the universe to our existence). Purpose comes from our consciousness — to me they are the same; although our purpose leaves a legacy that persists after consciousness departs. Consciousness arises gradually from the spectrum of life – a virus is somewhat alive but closer to a rock than we are in terms of its “purpose” (more mechanical, less choices to make), then as evolution added nervous systems and other bits to life, more choices and complexity piled on. Purpose could be said to exist throughout that spectrum, from “instinct” to “choice”, all of which involve some causation — and chance. Vast oversimplification here, yes, but please stay with me. I’m getting there.

To avoid the extreme ends of the blame spectrum, we have to pick our battles and choose what is right or wrong in our world view. Lately I’ve watched smaller-scale events like United’s awful treatment of a passenger (and inability to de-escalate, then terrible PR handling) and huge global events like the resurgence of anti-intellectualism/populism or the clusterf*@$ in Syria, and blame inevitably comes to mind. Those who had more power AND responsibility to amend these situations, like CEOs or politicians, often deserve more blame. But the more complex story is that blame can be spread around these situations, much as they rightly anger us.

On an even smaller scale, close to my own profession and direct experience, I read a story by a PhD supervisor that largely blamed their student for falling silent (“supervisor phobia”) and then having problems with their degree, while the supervisor “was too busy to notice for another six months.” That seemed to exhibit gross irresponsibility for apportionment of blame in a messy situation: the old-fashioned legacy of authoritative, hierarchical scientific culture when people ranging from the university, department, colleagues, supervisor and student were to blame. It’s also a learning opportunity for many of us, to see how a bad situation evolved and think about what could have been done differently—indeed, differently from what one participant judges post hoc.

The red flag of a silent student/staff member could mean many things: the person might be intimidated about poor progress– or they might have self-esteem sharing what is actually good progress, they might be totally inactive (too little training? Hard technical problems stopping them?), or more. The point is that time is vital and acting too late probably will only worsen the problem, adding more blame to the supervisor and upper echelons.

The overall, common-sense approach I’ve cultivated with figuring ways out of hard situations at work and elsewhere is to (1) watch for (potential) problems, (2) think them through – allowing for the conclusion to be that the situation is complex and requires a nuanced approach (e.g. openly accepting one’s own culpability, maybe not yet pointing fingers at others deserving blame), and then (3) take action to try to resolve them. “The system” (e.g. rules and regulations) may be part of the problem but it can also be part of the solution. Although the system’s carrot is far more pleasant to use than the stick, they are there for reasons, to be applied with empathy and patience. Being human, we can run out of those latter two things and their fuel levels need monitoring.

The hope is that, finally, action leads eventually to a better outcome with a lesson mutually learned and, eventually, greater peace of mind as we reconcile our worldview with reality. The distinct possibility, though, is that we can’t fix everything and sometimes we have to try to find contentment in an imperfect world. Some causes are mysterious and we might have to settle for that mystery. Or we can spiral into paranoia and conspiracy theories; all the rage today; which can be simple scenarios of blame or very elaborate ones. These scenarios deserve their own rational inspection for personal biases that lead toward them, and the desire for easy answers.

But we can still blame the fucked up shit, and that can be therapeutic. Even if we hold onto blame, we can forgive it. Maybe this holiday weekend is a good time to forgive someone that is blamed.

I was greatly inspired by scenes from the global Women’s March this weekend. It was one of the more beautiful things I’ve seen lately in times that otherwise feel very dark. I write this post with some trepidation but fuelled by that inspiration. While it is nominally about women (in science and the world) it applies just about as well to many other parts of American/British, Western and global society; especially to issues of social equality. I am definitely not an expert on this topic; experts probably will see nothing new here. Some would say that means I should be silent. I feel compelled to say something, for many reasons that I feel are valid. However, I have made dumb mistakes or just been ignorant of the issues throughout my life, so I do not claim to be on a pedestal of model behaviour. But this post is not about me or anyone I personally know per se. It is about humanity and what inspires (e.g. yesterday’s marchers) and worries (e.g. a person whose surname begins with a “T”) many people, and what I have gradually learned about human nature. If it helps one person inspect and maybe change their attitudes that would be wonderful, but I may never know if that is the case, which is fine. That, anyway, is my motivation; to support what I feel is important, and to address what the post’s title refers to. Not in a smug, let’s-show-how-politically-correct-we-are way, but in a positive way, endorsing that by opening our minds and hearts we can surprise ourselves with change that improves others’ lives and our own.

Stomach-Churning Rating: reactions will vary. No pictures.

If we abstract (Western) history into a direction over time, the status quo of white (non-poor, heterosexual, religious, etc.) males has changed over recent centuries, but it remains undeniably strong. The 1950s-1960s saw considerable changes and this trend continues. As a very brief generalization, that is cause for hope for humanity. But what worries many people today is that this trend, like any in history, could reverse, and thereby do great harm to many people. This concern is not based simply on idle speculation or propaganda but on clear actions, policies and statements of some world leaders (not just the “T” guy but he is prominent). No one knows what the future holds but people can choose to act or not act; and act in person (most effective) vs. act vocally (better than silence). Yesterday’s protests were peaceful, probably even more so than the inauguration was, and society should breathe a sigh of relief for that. But it doesn’t end there.

I want to get to one of the core issues that has helped me understand – and understanding here is so vital for society to heal the frightening rifts that have developed – why people are upset. This unsettled feeling many of us experience cuts both ways: those on the right-ward side of politics also may feel that their values are threatened. Some of those values are indeed common values, such as economic inequality and concerns about terrorism or war, much as we may differ on how we react to or prioritize them. These common values give me hope. There are few values that apply to 100% of us and that means there will always be people that are unhappy; I’m not an idealist who expects utopia anytime soon. Some values will not endure the “arrow of history”, either permanently or temporarily, and that frightens people for various reasons across the political spectrum. Neo-Nazis, and those that share some beliefs with them even if they consider themselves to be very distinct from fascists, might be emboldened lately, but they have a lot of history and social momentum to contend with.

For those that are unsettled by yesterday’s marches and other recent events, for whatever reason, I ask them to think about this: try putting yourself in the shoes of one of the marchers. Step outside yourself, be curious about what their background is, and practice empathy – what is it like to be, for example, a woman at this point in history? I’m a male so I can’t wholly experience that, but I am curious and I have cultivated some skill in empathy. I want to know what it’s like being different from me. Growing up in a moderately liberal Midwestern family with three females helped me do that (plus now having my own family), and now that I am a senior(ish) leader in my field I have to think about these things on a daily basis. But I’m not perfect, either. I keep learning. I try to listen.

One way that I continually remind myself to practice is to think of “death by a thousand cuts” (good STEM example linked there) – what does it feel like to, throughout one’s life, experience what a member of the non-status quo does? In the case of a woman, what does it feel like to continually be judged based on appearance, to be treated like property, to be told you’re inferior, to be expected to obey men, to statistically have worse pay and career advancement chances, to be dismissed as inexperienced no matter what your qualifications are, and much more; all in ways that qualitatively or quantitatively are not experienced by most men. It would wear me down, and that’s what women and other disadvantaged members of society experience. The situation has improved in some areas but still is far from fair or pleasant or, simply put, far from moral and ethical. Personally, the “thousand cuts” metaphor has helped me to empathize with many people. I reflect on it regularly.

The status quo have it easier (by definition), so hearing such people tell “social justice warriors” to be silent; to endure discrimination or assault; is deeply unsettling to those that have lived their lives suffering the thousand cuts, and to those that care about them. Free speech cuts both ways, too; it may feel hard to be criticized if you get shamed for speaking out against social equality. But do centuries of history of male dominance validate that men, too, have suffered the thousand cuts? No way, man. That’s where major fracture lines in society lie – women and other people don’t get to choose that they are on those lines, and may validly feel that their power to affect what society chooses to do is weaker.

Maybe the marches yesterday inspired, you, too. Maybe this post gets you to examine your own biases? Maybe we all have inclinations that are unconsciously a bit sexist, racist, homophobic and intolerant. And yes, we need to listen to those across the political spectrum, too, and try to find common ground that can improve life for as many people as possible. To bring things back to science and this blog, that common ground needs to have a foundation of facts. Those facts are out there, and in this “post-truth” time we need to work harder to share them and establish them, which does seem to make finding a common ground harder. Nonetheless, I hold on to hopes that we can do that, much as these times often feel very grim, as if we are at a critical juncture in history (e.g. climate change!) and yet society is so fractured it cannot do the right thing.

The world is complex. I’ve over-simplified things here; an “arrow of history” is debatable and probably not inevitable in most cases (maybe better put: there are sustained directions AND repeated cycles in history; most traversing generations). Simple statements often don’t hold true across reality; science shows us that the more we learn, the more complex and nuanced the world looks, and that can be baffling or even scary. Much as we should be suspicious of simple answers like “do not question authority” or “authority is wrong”, we should consider some simple answers as useful points of departure for deeper discussions. One such simple answer is that the women’s marchers did the right thing, showing peaceful but strong solidarity against oppressive stances that threaten them. If you oppose that simple answer, can you view it from their side, though, and understand their argument through curiosity about it and empathy for their lives? Inspect your own answer. Self-doubt is something scientists learn to practice and it is a healthy life-skill too.

Can you dream another person’s dreams? Can you help people wake up from their living nightmare? It needn’t take bravery to do this. It takes honest curiosity and empathy about the world outside your own. This applies to humanity and across nature, too. I’m not brave in posting this; I have it relatively easy. I can embrace that and I can make what might seem like sacrifices, and I can enjoy the outcome; I would love to see others live a better life. Many things have to happen for humanity to draw closer together, but these are among them. Not only could more curiosity and empathy make life better for humanity, but on a personal level those traits are good for mentoring, for teamwork, for being a good colleague, and should be good for anyone you care about.

I hadn’t been feeling very well for several weeks and then last night it happened. This post is a description of what it’s like to be an epileptic, written simply to document my experience. My goal here is to do that, almost in a dispassionate scientific way, and if it helps others going through similar experiences — feedback I often receive from such posts — that’s wonderful. My post is not a call for sympathy or help, although those are understandable and kind responses, and it’s not a complaint either. It just is, because what I am is what it is.

I’ve realized that my blog has become about not just documenting how amazing, freakish and immensely fallible that anatomy can be in other species, but also about my own experiences with my anatomy (and physiology) failing, as per these two prior posts about my shoulder and brain (more links therein). Sharing these experiences gives me strength and clarity, even if some of that emerges from partly detaching myself from the emotional nature of the experience and trying to look at it from outside of myself. I can be a private person, so feeling like I can discuss something uncomfortable and vulnerable makes me feel like I am growing, much as I innately resist that.

I’ve had enough experience now as an epileptic that I look back on my seizures with disappointment (“Oh damn, not again.”) but also familiarity (“OK that happened; I know how things will go now.”). They are terrifying at the time, especially for my family, and my disorientation when emerging from unconsciousness with strangers around and with a gap in my memory is nightmarish.

I was watching a documentary about the Jutland battle in WWI while my daughter was put to bed. Then… I woke up, maybe 20 minutes later, unsure what was going on. There were two “first responders” (emergency non-paramedics) present, one of whom I eventually recognized from my prior emergency experiences in recent months, trying to talk to me with my wife. I was impressed to later hear that they’d come within 5 minutes of being called; not bad for life in a small English town. I came to realize that my right shoulder hurt again (from violent spasms), reducing it to almost a one-degree-of-freedom joint (mostly able to move fore and aft; almost zero pronation/supination without intense pain), reminscent of Ichthyostega‘s. I was surrounded by tissues wet with blood from my lip, where I’d again bitten myself during my fit. I could sense my racing heartbeat and fluctuating temperature, other hallmarks of my pre- and post-seizure symptoms. My vision was blurry, with my eyes usually becoming dilated during a seizure.

But the predominant feeling that takes an uncomfortably long time to pass is the “post-ictal state“, a mind clouded by confusion, slowly becoming aware that my neurons are misfiring but are beginning to sort themselves out. I sometimes irrationally want to just go back to sleep and not talk, and need some rational insistence from carers that we can’t do that right now. It is this vacillation between consciousness and unconsciousness, in a grey area in between, that I find most disturbing, as I cannot completely trust my own mind, disbelieving what is happening (“Is this real?”), and sometimes I lapse back into seizure(s) again. This is a powerful example of the frightfulness of uncertainty. As a scientist, so reliant on my mind, it is horrifying to feel like it is out of control. It also conjures up memories of observing my mother’s mind declining with Alzheimer’s syndrome, and those are vastly painful.

As I became able to put words together semi-coherently, and as the medics poked and prodded me to do tests on my symptoms (I had a cannula in my left arm’s blood vessel by now), discussion turned to whether to take me to the hospital once the paramedics arrived with the ambulance. In the past, there was no question of the need for a trip to Accident & Emergency (A&E in the UK; same as the ER in the USA).

Yet now, with almost 2 years of experiences behind me, I (and my carers) have come to know my better seizures from my worst ones. And given that A&E normally involves >4 hours of lying around in a noisy room, constantly disturbed by checkups or screaming patients, it is far from restful and rest is what I tend to need most. After an hour of vigilance, my symptoms faded and I became more able to answer queries, even to talk over options. We agreed that I could stay home, try to rest, and go to A&E if I had another seizure.

I am glad to say that I got a full night of rest and I feel a lot better today. That I am able to think clearly enough to write this post gives me reassurance. After past seizures, I’d often be unable to do much except take naps and gawk slack-jawed at the TV screen, with my vision still blurred (one eye even seemed to change shape post-seizure once, and I began seeing things in the corner of my field of view that are not truly there). So the bright side of this post is, maybe my medications are working better now, and maybe we will get this epilepsy under control, but I keep saying that every 2-3 months and then being proven wrong by another seizure, so a lot of uncertainty looms.

Nonetheless, seizures involve a “refractory period” that makes further seizures less likely for some time period, so odds are good that I can feel more secure while I recover from this event, which usually takes two weeks or so to get my brain feeling closer to “normal”. Even so, my mind remains clouded by these post-ictal feelings, weighting me down with fatigue that is the most chronic challenge I struggle against now as an epileptic. It leaves me unable to do as much as I once could, with a backlog of work growing behind me like never before. This is the “diminishing” that I lamented before; it is not just old age.

That’s what one experience was like for me, and I’m glad that it was far from the worst “neural storms” I’ve suffered. I hope that readers find it interesting. Now that my battle is over for now, I’ll take some time to find out how that Jutland battle turned out.

I’m now asked all the time how I’m holding up in light of recent changes in my life, and I have a hard time answering that question, as I am still not sure – except that I am still here, more or less. Over the past year I’ve grown to embrace the notion, reinforced very strongly by my own frequent experiences, that I am disabled (in the medical/legal sense). I’ve had a harder time embracing the idea that I am now part of a minority group (I have strongly accepted that I am a senior, white, male scientist in the upper-middle class; which conflicts with “minority” in every way). Categorization aside, one conclusion I’ve been grappling with is the strong sense that I have been diminished. I can’t think as clearly, my memories are fading and my body is increasingly decrepit in physical and physiological ways that are becoming obvious to me. And yet I struggle to explain these feelings to people. So here I am, writing a blog post that is partly about what it’s like to feel that my personal “glory days” as a human scientist have passed. It’s not very uplifting stuff although there is a surprise of sorts at the end.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 1/10; a medical imaging scan of my disintegrating body, and a cartoon of surgery.

Before I go into my sob story, I should reinforce that there’s not just doom and gloom here. There is a heady, very complex mix of feelings. I’ve still got a great family (save the demise of all of my close relatives from my parental generation and before) and friends. Much of the time I’m still able to smile and have some fun. I’m not a Syrian refugee clinging to life in a tent while the world turns its back on me, or an Indonesian orangutan aloft in a tree watching the forest burn around it while the palm oil plantations spring up in the distance. All is relative. I know my life best and that’s what I blog about, so here is that infinitesimal perspective on life.

At work, I am buoyed by a fantastic team of scientists; some of the best I’ve ever worked with. They churn away at the science while I try to lead them. We’re doing some very hard science lately; some of the most challenging work I’ve been involved in. And my declined health hasn’t helped me to lead them, so sometimes they’ve had to rely on each other for spans of time. It’s not the best analogy but I often feel like we are in the open sea and I am swimming in front of our boat full of precious science, navigating while I barely keep my head above water and they struggle with the oars and their own exhaustion. In real life, it’s seeing their smiling faces and the wonderful science they show me on a regular basis that helps me keep afloat, personally.

Indeed, one take-home message of this post is that, while feel myself diminish, struggling with normal ageing and major new health problems, I see those I mentor grow and I get a vicarious thrill and pride from it. This is something that I know many research scientists experience to varying degrees, and often in conjunction with the too-often-metaphorized(?) experience of parenting and having the joy of seeing one’s offspring mature while one feels old age encroaching. As many research managers witness, I see my team’s collective research expand and build new levels of coolness in our little domain, I get wiser by reflecting on the successes and failures, and one could say I enjoy some credit from my team’s work by navigating our general course of research while they do the daily technical work and I help mentor them through their careers.

But first, a content cat.

At the same time, as my collaborations and range of projects broaden, following my increasingly integrative interests, I see my relativeexpertise decreasing. It seems a long way now from my postdoc years, just over a decade ago, when I could run most or all of the software and hardware I needed to do the science. I am increasingly uncomfortable with that. However, I still learn new skills and knowledge so I am far from static as a scientist, and I am pushing myself more and more to learn more, wrestling with my age/health-imposed difficulties in learning. Furthermore, as a human being I feel far more aware of the world and the broader issues at stake than ever before (thanks in part to social media, I should add; but also thanks to my curiosity about life beyond my research). Improving my mind is still a goal of mine. The “diminishing” label I apply here is not that fair perhaps, but it’s how I feel about myself and I am sure there is some truth to it. It is the foe I grapple with.

So I get bemused reactions when I’m asked how it’s going and I respond, somewhat glumly, that I’m “hanging in there”. Many know I’m having health problems and tell me they are inspired by how I’ve held up and how well my (team’s) research and science communication and other work seems to be going, from the outside. Indeed, we’re cranking out more papers and surprising amounts of funding (see below) than ever before, so on paper it does look very good. It helps a little to hear those comments of how impressed some friends and colleagues are, but I don’t feel very impressed with myself. I feel lucky to have a great team of scientists and to have a great job in an insanely good laboratory environment, because otherwise things would be very different for me. I’m starkly aware of my privilege and feel vastly fortunate for having it.

My personal experience in work/life doesn’t reflect the joy of “success” that might seem to spring forth from my CV or the image that the outside world might get of me. I’m seesawing back and forth between those intermittent joys (and other happiness that comes from life away from work!) and a sense of hopelessness. I see the grim state of humanity and the broader world, and I look within and see my own decrepitude advancing, and I feel sad. It’s not a clinically manic-depressive seesaw but I can see some similarities when I apply my scientific detachment skills and look at myself from a quasi-objective perspective. I’m not the naïve, “everything is excellent” optimistic grad student I was—I just see flickers of that person these days. Sometimes I like to see him.

Much of the torques applied to the seesaw come from my oscillating health status- I alternate between good and bad days, with hints of a broader weekly rhythm that my physicians and I are still trying to grasp. Those oscillations determine everything for me: I can be bursting with energy and make strong inroads on my “to do” list, or I can be utterly drained and unable to do much more than stare vacantly or maybe fire off some emails to make incremental progress on work. I tend to be lingering somewhere in the middle, with far less vitality on average than I had two or so years ago. I look back on those past years and feel like I am looking up at the peak of my life and career. Time will tell if that’s “true” in some way or not.

Regardless, over the past 18 months there have been huge “valleys” from when I end up in hospital after major epileptic attacks, with a couple of weeks of recovery afterwards. Overall, my capacity to do what I used to be able to do has been halved. At best, I feel like I can operate at maybe 90% of my peak capacity and that never lasts long. Some of this is the inevitable decline that comes with entering one’s mid-forties, but some is a new step-change that has hit me over the past 18+ months since I became an epileptic suffering from tonic-clonic (“grand mal”) seizures every 2-3 months. Why is this suddenly happening and why haven’t the doctors resolved it yet? Well, the short answers are that my brain had damage (I told that story here) that can lead to epilepsy later in life, and that medicine still isn’t perfect. Epilepsy that cannot be entirely suppressed by existing medication is still common. We’re still experimenting with medications for me but it’s too soon to tell if we’ve found a solution, and we might never.

I heard some wise words a while ago that “we’re more content to blame ourselves than to accept that some things are beyond our control” and I’ve taken that to heart. Life is scary and short and it’s true that a lot is out of our control, especially the end of life. In reflection, I’ve been tempted to look back on choices I made in life and try to blame myself for what damage that has wrought on me (or others), but in terms of health I question that assumption. I may just be the victim of bad luck (genes, etc), but some people find bad luck too hard to accept, implying an indifferent universe rather than free will leading to misfortune/fortune. I’m not out of hope but I’ve accepted that the current state of my life might be just how it will be, and that’s been a hard lesson, but one I’ve learned again and again with my many chronic health problems over 20+ years. I don’t blame myself (much) for all that. More than ever, I appreciate the other wise words that “everyone is fighting a struggle you know nothing about”. I might look to an external observer like I’m kicking ass, but I feel anything but that kind of triumphant, fist-pumping jubilation.

I feel lucky to still be here, and eager to keep it that way, but I am so, so tired. Intellectually, physically, emotionally, it’s like a vampire has been paying me regular visits. And so I have to sigh, more than I used to, when confronted with bullshit like excessive paperwork or petty politics or something else I wish I didn’t have to endure, deeply feeling life slipping past as I do endure it, but that’s life for you. And at work, as a senior research manager, that’s often my job to endure it, in ways I’d never experienced as a junior researcher. I just have to cope with being pummelled by waves of difficulties and not grow weaker if I can avoid it. Coupled with life’s other burdens, the diminishing scientist faces a different beast of challenges and can often feel very alone. It’s a strange new place I’ve found myself in, far more complex than the worries I had as a postdoc, with harder choices to make and vast grey areas to traverse.

Nonetheless, as welfare science likes to term it, it’s entirely “a life worth living”. I have to pick my battles more than I used to, and I’ve had to learn to take more time to get exercise, rest, and avoid the stresses (or even unpleasant people) that can cause my health to take rapid downward spirals. I’m more fragile in many ways, such as having to stop doing karate because my shoulders have weakened. Here’s some interesting anatomy for you from a recent MRI scan of my right shoulder:

My left shoulder in top cross-sectional view, with the missing parts of my humeral head crudely outlined in red. There’s more amiss here, too.

My seizures cause my shoulder flexors to spasm, raising my arms up and crushing my humerus against my glenoid cavity of my scapula and causing occasional dislocations that abrade the humerus against the rim of the glenoid. The result, after numerous seizures, has been the wearing away of the articular cartilage of my shoulder and then the crumbling of the bony head of my humerus. Thus, once my NHS surgeon is ready to in coming months, I am due to have my coracoid process of my scapula cut off and moved, with its attached muscles and ligaments, to be screwed into the front of my glenoid cavity, bracing my humeral head more tightly against the glenoid and thereby resisting future dislocations. Luckily that operation can be done with several small incisions and endoscopy; invasive as the surgery is; thus recovery time won’t be so long.

It amuses me that all of this intense surgery looming on the horizon doesn’t worry me. I just want it done. I’ve been through a comparable surgery with my left shoulder, involving screwing my greater tuberosity back onto my humerus, so I know what recovery is like, and now that shoulder is doing fine. All that aside, my physical integrity has declined and I feel it every day. I may never return to my karate classes and earn that black belt I was seeking as a life-goal, but time will tell. I am trying to do what I can to remain as strong as I can for as long as I can.

A year from now all of my major funding and most or all of my research team were due to finish or be finishing. Over the past year, I was thinking forward to this eventuality and truly looking forward to having a smaller, quieter team, with less pressures on me. Many of those pressures are self-imposed because I am still ambitious and love doing science. I can still feel that youthful passion welling up inside me sometimes, so strong that I imagine it to be a tidal wave that could consume the world. It fuels my drive to try to do more, better science, but is dampened now by the problems I’ve lamented above, but it’s still there. So that passion and drive led me to, on a whim, resubmit an EU grant that was rejected a couple of years ago. I didn’t take it super seriously and so writing the grant didn’t stress me out. But a week after submitting it, I was back in hospital anyway, in bad shape. Over the following nine months, I grew to hope that the grant wasn’t awarded and expected that it wouldn’t (given <20% funding rate especially as a young Advanced Investigator in that ERC funding programme; https://goo.gl/Ps0Rhd if you want to know what that means). A big part of me still wanted to have that smaller team and less (or no) funding. I’d even contemplated leaving academia. I dream sometimes of retiring early to a quiet life with my family or wandering off into some jungle for a foolish adventure, but neither is realistic.

Yet a few weeks ago, the email from the EU came with an answer. I got the grant: 2.5 million Euros for 5 years of research on dinosaur evolution and biomechanics. More about that later. The funding details are still in negotiation but I now am on course to be advertising (in ~August) 4 new jobs to work with me for up to 5 years on this project, beginning in October. My reaction has puzzled those colleagues I’ve told about the grant, although I have kept that news quiet (until now) while I finish the paperwork for the grant award. I feel mixed about getting a large grant at this time in my life. It’s a helluva lot of work and five years seems a very, very long time to me, and to focus on one major theme—and to study dinosaurs.

I had also looked forward to moving away from dinosaur research—but, like Al says in the video above, their siren call can drag us back to the Mesozoic era with questions that entice us and with spectacular fossils that are a riot of fun to study. In this case, we’re going to be looking back on the “locomotor superiority” hypothesis that has been bounced around for >40 years as a possible explanation for why dinosaurs flourished whereas other archosaurs (except crocodylomorphs) didn’t, and how much bipedality relates to that, in terms of various behaviours and motions. Can these questions even be answered? We shall see.

Yes, boo hoo! Poor me, getting a coveted grant and all that! I am not surprised if that is hard for others to understand, and I still am figuring out how I feel about it all. Professionally, this is a wonderful thing; no question. Personally, it’s pressure I didn’t need to put my disabled, diminished self through. Irony and conundrum aside, I want to do it and I should try. Regardless, off I go, with a new-team-to-come and my research focus dominated by one main project, the largest grant I’ve ever managed (by a long shot!). It’s interesting times for me ahead. Life has come full circle, returning me back to science-ing the dinosaurs/archosaurs I’d focused on in my PhD work. But I am not the same person, and so it will be a very different experience. Somehow I have to balance this challenging project with the struggles in my life in general, and that will test me in diverse ways. I’m sure there will be many surprises in my work and personal life during the next five years, and I’ll be sharing them here on this blog when I can.

I’ve tried to express my own journey through the big ups and downs I’ve seen over two years. Maybe it will help others who are quietly, or noisily, struggling. I’m curious to hear from others that have experienced feelings of themselves declining as their careers/lives (in science/elsewhere) move along in some direction.

Goodbye Pedro (?/?/2014-23/4/2016). We had too little time together. What we shared was so lovely. Parting has been terrible sorrow.

I awoke on the floor in the aisle of my United Airlines flight to Los Angeles, with three unfamiliar men crouched around me, bearing serious expressions as they looked down on my prone body.

I was next to my seat. My daughter was crying inconsolably in her seat next to mine, and my wife was calling to me with an urgent tone from the next seat over.

Gradually, as my confusion faded and the men let go of me (I’d been cursing them out, in mangled words because I had bitten my tongue), I became aware that I was in intense pain, I could not move much, and my wife’s words became clearer:

I’d had a seizure. And so our relaxing family holiday, which had only just begun, ended. And so my waking nightmare began.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 5/10; lots of Anatomy Fail CT/x-ray images and gruesome descriptions, and a photo of some bruising.

I was helped back into my seat as I regained my senses, I noticed blood on me from my tongue, and I learned that we were 2 hours away from L.A. As I was acting more normal, and we were 5/6 of our journey along, there was no need to prematurely land the flight. I had fallen asleep while watching “22 Jump Street”, about 1.5 hrs in, and that’s when my seizure struck– much like the previous two seizures I’d had. Jonah Hill could be ruled out as a culprit, but going to sleep was an enabling factor. I got some over-the-counter painkillers and sat in a daze as time ticked by, we landed, and paramedics boarded the plane to whisk me off to the hospital with my family.

Two gruelling days and nights in a California hospital later, with my first night spent in a haze of clinical tests, begging for painkillers, yelling in pain every time I moved, and otherwise keeping my hospital roommate awake, the story became clearer: my seizure was so intense that I’d dislocated my right shoulder (unfortunately I’d not had much pain relief when the emergency room staff popped it back into my glenoid), probably dislocated my left shoulder too but then relocated it myself admist my thrashing, and done this (cue Anatomy Fail images):

Left shoulder, with the offending greater tubercle/tuberosity of the humerus showing fracture(s).

Right shoulder x-ray, showing dislocation of the head of the humerus from the glenoid. Compare with above image- humerus has been shifted down, the shoulder joint is facing you. BUT no fractures, yay!

What’s amazing is that the fractures most likely occurred purely via my own uncontrolled muscle contractions. All the karate and weight-training I’d been doing certainly had made me stronger in my rotator cuff muscles, which attach to the greater tubercle of the humerus. And with inhibition of my motoneurons turned off during my seizure, and both agonist and antagonist muscles near-maximally turned on, rapid motions of my shoulders by my spasming muscles would have dislocated my shoulders and then wrenched apart some of the bony attachments of those same muscles. I’m glad I don’t remember this happening.

I had also complained of pain in my neck, so they did a CT scan and x-ray there too:

X-ray: No broken neck. This is good. Just muscle strain, which soon faded.

The left shoulder injuries created a hematoma, or mass of blood beneath my skin, and soon that surfaced and began draining down my arm (via the lymphatic system under gravity’s pull), creating fascinating patterns:

Bruises migrating; no pain associated with these, just superficial drainage of old blood. This is tame, tame, tame compared to what my left ribcage looked like. I’ve spared you that.

But then more fundamentally there was the question of, why a seizure? With no clear warning? As I’ve explained before, I’d had a stroke ~12 yrs ago that caused a similar seizure but with no injuries to my postcranial body. So a series of MRI and CT scans ensued (the radiation I’ve had from the latter is good fodder for a superhero/villain origin tale? Marvel, I’ll await your call), and there was no clear damage or bleeding, and hence no stroke evident. Good news.

There are, however, at least two sizeable calcifications in my brain that are likely to be hardened scar tissue from my stroke. These may or may not have an identifiable affect on me or linkage with the seizure. Brain calcifications can happen for a variety of reasons, sometimes without clear ill effects.

Calcification in parietal lobe of my cerebrum, from axial CT scan slice. But no bleeding (zone of altered density/contrast).

That is the state of the evidence. I’ve since had what semblance of a L.A. family holiday I could manage, benefitting from a touching surge of support from my family, friends and colleagues that has kept me from sinking entirely into despair and has brought quite a few smiles.

The plane flight home was tense. We were in the same seats again and one of the flight attendants recognized us and came to chat, eager to learn what had happened after we left the plane a week ago. He was very nice and the doctors had given me an “OK to fly” letter. But it was an evening flight. I needed to sleep, yet it was clear to me that sleep was no longer the fortress of regenerative sanctity that I was used to it being. Sleep had taken on a certain menace, because it was a state in which I’d now had three seizures. Warily, I drifted off to sleep after having some hearty chuckles at the ending to “22 Jump Street”. And while it was not very restful slumber, it was the friendly kind of slumber that held no convulsive violence within its embrace. We returned home safely.

In a rush, I cancelled my attendance at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference this week, turning over the symposium I’d convened to honour one of my scientific heroes, biomechanist R. McNeill Alexander (who also could not attend due to ill health), to my co-convenors Eric Snively and Andreas Christian (by accounts I heard, all went well). I missed out on a lot of fun and the joy of watching 2 of my PhD students present posters on preliminary results of their research. Thanks to social media and email, however, I’ve been able to catch a lot of the highlights and excitement from that conference in Berlin.That has helped distract me somewhat from other goings-on.

Meanwhile, I’ve been resting, doing a minimal amount of catching up with work, having a lot of meetings with doctors to arrange treatment, and pondering my situation– a lot.

I know this much: I’ve had two violent seizures in a month (the previous one was milder but still bad, and not a story I need to tell here), and so I’m now an epileptic, technically. When and if I’ll have another seizure is totally uncertain, but to boost the odds in my favour I’m on anti-convulsant drugs for a long time now.

In about half of seizure cases, it’s never clear what caused the seizures. What caused my 2002 stroke is somewhat clear, but the mechanism behind that remains a mystery, and my other health problems likewise have a lot of question marks regarding their genesis and mutually causative relationships, if any. The outcome of this new development in my medical history is likely to be: “maybe your brain calcifications and scar tissue helped stimulate your new seizures, but we can’t be sure. The treatment is the same regardless: stay on anti-convulsants for a while, try going off them later, and see if seizures manifest themselves again or not.” Brains are freaking complicated; when they go haywire it can be perplexing why.

As a scientist, I thrill at finding uncertainty in my research topics because that always means there is work left to be done. But in my own life outside of science, stubborn, independent, strong-willed control freak that I can certainly be at times, I am not such a fan of uncertainty. In both cases the goal is to minimize that uncertainty by gathering more information, but in our lives we often encounter unscalable walls of uncertainty that persist because of lack of knowledge regarding a problem that vexes us, especially a medical problem. We then can feel in a helpless state, adrift on the horizon of science, waiting for explorers to push that horizon further and with it advance our treatment or at least our insight into ourselves.

When the subject of that uncertainty is not some detached, objective, unthreatening, exciting research topic but rather ourselves and our own future constitution and mortality, it thus becomes deeply personal and disconcerting. I’m grateful that I don’t have brain cancer or some other clear and present threat to my immediate vitality. Things could be a lot worse; I am here writing this blog after all. I’ll never forget now being in the ambulance and thinking “this may be the end of it all; I might not last much longer”, and choking out a farewell to my wife just in case things took a bad turn. I’m grateful for the amazing things that modern medicine and imaging techniques can do– these have saved my life so many times over, I cannot fathom how to quantify it. And I’m grateful for the people that have helped me through this so far. Fiercely independent as I may be, I can’t face everything alone.

I am reminded of words I read recently by Baruch Spinoza, “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.” To further paraphrase him, we love truth because it is knowledge that enables us to stay alive- without it, we are flying blind and soon will crash. With the freedom it brings, we know the landscape of our own life and where the frontiers of uncertainty lie (“here be dragons”).

The past two weeks have been horrendous for me. I’d been feeling healthy and stronger than ever in many ways, and my life as of my birthday a month ago felt pretty damn good. But now everything has come crashing down in disaster, and I have been suffering from the realization, once again, of how vulnerable I am and how little I can control, and the darkness that ushers in as the odds begin to stack up against our future lives. I am acutely aware now of where the “dragons” are.

I am taking one important step forward, though, in wresting life back onto the rails again- this week I undergo surgery to put my left shoulder back together. While that’s scary, to be sliced open and have my rotator cuff and bones carpentered back where they should be, I know I’m in good hands with a top UK shoulder surgeon and methods that are tried-and-true. The risks are small, although the recovery time will be long. There won’t be any hefting of big frozen elephant feet in my research soon, not for me, and so my enjoyable anatomy studies are going to have to change their track for coming months while I regain my strength and rely on others’ help.

Then we’re on to the frightening task of tackling the spasmodic-gorilla-in-the-room with neurologists. We’ll see where that journey leads.

One thing is certain: I’m still me and there’s still a lot of fight left in me, because I have a lot left to fight for, and people and knowledge to aid me in that fight. I can shoulder the burden of uncertainty in my life because I have all that. Off I go…

I’ve had surgery to put my greater tuberosity back where it belongs. Thanks to a skilled surgeon’s team, some sutures and nickel-titanium staples, I am back closer to my normal morphology and can begin recovering my (currently negligible) shoulder joint’s range of motion via some physiotherapy. Surgery went very well; I was just in hospital for ~30 hours; but the 9 days of recovery since have been brutally hard due to problems switching medications around. Today I got my stitches out and a beautiful x-ray showing plentiful healing; yay!

This is a slightly oblique anterior (front) view of my left shoulder/chest. Fracture callus means healing is working well!Four surgical staples (bright white thingies on upper RH side of image): forever now a part of my anatomy.

I’ve been doing a series of career guidance sessions with my research team, and this past week we talked about how to structure a successful career path as a scientist. As part of that, I gave my thoughts on how to maximize chances of that “success” (traditional definition; getting a decent permanent job as a researcher, and doing a good job at it); without knowingly being a jerk or insincere. This process led me to re-inspect my own career for insights — not that I’ve been on perfect behaviour, but I do routinely reflect on choices I make.

I asked myself, “What does success mean to me?” to see what my answer was today. That led to me writing up this story of my career path, as an example of the twists and turns that can happen in the life of a scientist. I originally intended to share this story just with my team, but then I decided to turn into a full-on blog post, in my ongoing personal quest to open up and share my thoughts and experiences with others. For those who have read my advice to PhD students, there are some commonalities, but plenty of this is new.

Where my last post was partly about publicly exposing vulnerabilities in other scientists, this one is about privately finding one’s own vulnerabilities along with the strengths, and sharing them publicly. The story is about me, but the key points are more about how “success” can evolve in science (N=1 plus anecdotal observations of others).

Growing Up in Grad School

As an undergraduate student, I was clueless about my career until I applied to graduate school a second time. The first time I tried applying, I didn’t even know how to really go about it, or what I wanted to do beyond some sort of biology. Yet to my credit I was curious, creative, a swift learner with a great memory for science, and broadly educated in biology and other fields (thanks, parents and past teachers!). I read and watched “Jurassic Park” and lots of Stephen Jay Gould and Darwin or palaeontology books, and I just tried to actively learn all I could, reading compulsively. I even resolved to quit non-science reading for a few years, and stuck to that. I realized that a research career combining evolution and biomechanics was of interest to me, involving vertebrates and maybe fossils.

I got into grad school in 1995 and had a great project to study how dinosaurs moved, but I felt inadequate compared to my peers. So I dedicated myself even harder to reading and learning. I didn’t pass my first orals (qualifying exam; appraisal/defense) but that helped me to refocus even more resolutely on deep learning, especially to fill gaps in my knowledge of biomechanics methods that I’d later use. During this time I also learned website design and HTML code (mid-90s; early WWW!), working with several others on Berkeley’s UCMP website in my free time. I intensively networked with colleagues via email lists (the long-lived Dinosaur listproc) and at a lot of conferences, trying to figure out how science worked and how to go about my project. That was a powerful initial formative period.

It was a gruelling struggle and I’d had serious health problems (a narrow escape from cancer) around the same time, too. I frequently, throughout the 1990’s, doubted if I could make it in the field. I looked around me and could not see how I could become successful in what I wanted to do (marry biomechanics and evolutionary biology in stronger ways). I was so scared, so uncertain of my own work, that I didn’t know what to do—I had a project but had no clue how to really implement it. So two years passed in semi-paralysis, with little concrete science to show for it, and I gave a lot of *bad* internal seminars in Berkeley’s Friday biomechanics group. However, those bad seminars helped me to become a better speaker. I had a terrible fear of public speaking; on top of having little data, this experience was brutal for me. But I used it as practice, bent to the task of bettering myself.

A change in my career trajectory happened as my research slowly took root. I wrote some book chapters for a dinosaur encyclopedia in 1997, a simple paper describing a little dinosaur in 1998, then another paper on taxonomy published in 1999. [For those wanting to find out what any of these papers I mention are, they are on my Publications page, often with pdfs] These papers at least showed I could finish a research task; when I was younger I’d had some bad habits of not finishing work I started.

I visited a lot of museums and hung out with people there, socializing while learning about diverse fossils and their evolutionary anatomy, implementing what I’d learned from my own dissections and literature studies of living animals. This led to a poster (actually two big posters stacked atop each other; plotting the evolution of the reptilian pelvis and muscles) at a palaeontology meeting (SVP). This poster turned a few heads and I suppose convinced some that I knew something about bone and soft tissue anatomy.

Then in 1998, I did a 4-month visiting scholarship at Brown University with Steve Gatesy that had a big impact on my career: Steve helped me consolidate ideas about how anatomy related to function in dinosaurs, and how to interpret data from living animals (I did my first gait experiments, with guineafowl, which went sort of OK), and I loved Brown University’s EEB department environment. For once, I felt like a grown-up, as people started to listen to what I had to say. In retrospect, I was still just a kid in many other ways. I didn’t really achieve a lot of what Steve asked me to do; I was unfocused, but changing steadily.

In 1999, I gave a talk at SVP that was well received, based on that research with Gatesy, and then I gave it again at SICB. I had a few prominent scientists encouraging me to apply for faculty jobs (e.g., Beth Brainerd was very supportive)– this gave me a new charge of excitement and confidence. I finally began to feel like a real expert in my little area of science. That talk became our 2000 “Abductors, adductors…” paper in Paleobiology, which I still love for its integrative nature and broad, bold (but incompletely answered) questions. Yet when a respected professor at Berkeley told me before my University of Chicago faculty job interview “You act like a deer in the headlights too often,” I knew I had a long journey of self-improvement left. And a lot of that improvement just came with time– and plenty of mistakes.

Momentum continued to build for my career in 2000 as I took my anatomical work into more biomechanical directions and passed my orals. I gave an SVP Romer Prize (best student talk) presentation on my new T. rex biomechanical modelling work, and I won! I felt truly appreciated, not just as an expert but as an emerging young leader in my research area. I’ll never forget the standing ovation at the award announcement in Mexico City—seeing people I saw as famous and amazing get up and cheer for me was such a rush! Then I published two lengthy anatomical papers in Zool J Linn Soc in 2001, which still are my most cited works — even more than some of my subsequent Nature papers.

Evolution: Postdoc to Faculty

Also in 2001, I was awarded a NSF postdoc at Stanford to do exactly what I’d long wanted to do: build detailed biomechanical models of dinosaurs, using the anatomical work I’d done before. That was it: I saw evidence that I had “made it”. But that took about six years; toward the end of my PhD; to truly feel this way most of the time, and in some ways this feeling led to youthful overconfidence and brashness that I had to later try to shed. I feel fortunate that the rest of my career went more smoothly. I doubt I could have endured another six years of struggling as I did during my PhD. But it wasn’t easy, either. During my postdoc I had to force my brain to think like a mechanical engineer’s and that was a difficult mental struggle.

The year 2002 became a wild ride for me.

First, my T. rex “not a fast runner” paper got published in Nature, and I was thrown into the limelight of the news media for two weeks or so. Luckily I was ready for the onslaught — one of my mentors, Bob Full, warned me, “This will be huge. Prepare!” I handled it well and I learned a lot about science communication in the process.

Shortly after that publication, just before my wedding’s bachelor party, I developed terrible leg blood clots and had to cancel my party—but I recovered in time for the wedding, which was a fantastic event on a California clifftop. I enjoyed a good life and seemed healthy again. I kept working hard, I got my second paper accepted at Nature on bouncy-running elephants, and then…

Then I had a stroke, just before that Nature paper got published.

Everything came crashing to a halt and I had to think about what it all meant—these were gigantic life-and-death questions to face at age 31! Luckily, I recovered without much deficit at all, and I regained my momentum with renewed stubborn dedication and grit, although my recover took many months, and took its toll on my psyche. I’ve told this story before in this post about my brain.

I started seeing therapists to talk about my struggles, which was a mixed blessing: I became more aware of my personality flaws, but also more aware of how many of those flaws wouldn’t change. I’m still not sure if that was a good thing but it taught me a lot of humility, which I still revisit today. I also learned to find humour and wonder in the dark times, which colours even this blog.

In winter of 2003 I went to a biomechanics symposium in Calgary, invited by British colleague Alan Wilson. Later that spring, Alan encouraged me to apply for an RVC faculty job (“you’ll at least get an interview and a free trip to London”), which I said no to (vet school and England move didn’t seem right to me), but later changed my mind after thinking it over.

I got the RVC job offer the day before my actual job talk (luckily colleague David Polly warned me that things like this happened fast in the UK, unlike the months of negotiation in the USA!). I made the move in November 2003 and the rest was hard work, despite plenty of mistakes and lessons learned, that paid off a lot career-wise. If I hadn’t taken that job I’d have been unemployed, and I had postdoc fellowships and faculty job applications that got rejected in 2002-2003, so I was no stranger to rejection. It all could have gone so differently…

But it wasn’t a smooth odyssey either—there were family and financial struggles, and I was thousands of miles away while my mother succumbed to Alzheimer’s and my father swiftly fell victim to cancer, and I never was 100% healthy and strong after my troubles in 2002. Even in the late 2000’s, I felt inadequate and once confided to a colleague something like “I still feel like a postdoc here. I’m a faculty member and I don’t feel like I’ve succeeded.”

Since then, I’ve achieved some security that has at last washed that feeling away. That was a gradual process, but I think the key moment I realized that “I’ll be OK now” was in 2010 when I got the call, while on holiday in Wales (at the time touring Caernarfon Castle), informing me that my promotion to full Professor was being approved. It was an anticlimactic moment because that promotion process took 1 year, but it still felt great. It felt like success. I’ll never earn the “best scientist ever” award, so I am content. I don’t feel I have something big left to prove to myself in my career, so I can focus on other things now. It “only” took 15 or so years…

Ten Lessons Learned

When I look back on this experience and try to glean general lessons, my thoughts are:

1) Socializing matters so much for a scientific career. “Networking” isn’t a smarmy or supercilious approach, either; in fact, that insincerity can backfire and really hurt one’s reputation. I made a lot of friends early on — some of my best friends today are scientist colleagues. Many of these have turned into collaborators. Making friends in science is a win-win situation. Interacting with fellow scientists is one of the things I have always enjoyed most about science. Never has it been clearer to me how important the human element of science is. Diplomacy is a skill I never expected to use much in science, but I learned it through a lot of experience, and now I treasure it.

2) Developing a thicker skin is essential, but being vulnerable helps, too. Acting impervious just makes you seem inhuman and isolates you. Struggling is natural and helped me endure the tough times that came along with the good times, often in sharp transition. Science is freaking hard as a career. Even with all the hard work, nothing is guaranteed. Whether you’re weathering peer review critiques, politics, or health or other “life problems”, you need strength, whether it comes from inside you or from those around you. Embrace that you won’t be perfect but strive to do your best despite that. Regret failures briefly (be real with yourself), learn from them and then move on.

3) Reading the literature can be extremely valuable. So many of my ideas came from obsessive reading in diverse fields, and tying together diverse ideas or finding overlooked/unsolved questions and new ways to investigate them. I can’t understand why some scientists intentionally don’t try to read the literature (and encourage their students to follow this practice!), even though it is inevitable to fall behind the literature; you will always miss relevant stuff. I think it can only help to try to keep up that scholarly habit, and it is our debt to past scientists as well as our expectation of future ones—otherwise why publish?

4) I wish I learned even more skills when I was younger. It is so hard to find time and energy now to learn new approaches. This inevitably leads to a researcher becoming steadily less of a master of research methods and data to more of a manager of research. So I am thankful for having the wisdom accumulated via trial and error experiences to keep me relevant and useful to my awesome team. That sharing of wisdom and experience is becoming more and more enjoyable to me now.

5) Did I “succeed” via hard work or coincidence? Well, both—and more! I wouldn’t have gotten here without the hard work, but I look back and I see a lot of chance events that seemed innocent at the time, but some turned out to be deeply formative. Some decisions I made look good in retrospect, but they could have turned out badly, and I made some bad decisions, too; those are easy to overlook given that the net result has been progress. Nothing came easily, overall. And I had a lot of help from mentors, too; Kevin Padian and Scott Delp in particular. Even today, I would not say that my career is easy, by any stretch. I still can find it very draining, but it’s so fun, too!

6) Take care of yourself. I’ve learned the hard way that the saying “At least you have your health” is profoundly wise. I try to find plenty of time now to stop, breathe and observe my life, reflecting on the adventures I’ve had so far. The feelings evoked by this are rich and complex.

7) If I could go back, I’d change a lot of decisions I made. We all would. But I’m glad I’ve lived the life I’ve lived so far. At last, after almost 20 years of a career in science, I feel mostly comfortable in my own skin, more able to act rather than be frozen in the headlights of adversity. I know who I am and what I cannot be, and things I need to work on about myself. In some ways I feel more free than I’ve felt since childhood, because the success (as I’ve defined it in my life) has given me that freedom to try new things and take new risks, and I feel fortunate for that. I think I finally understand the phrase “academic freedom” and why it (and tenure) are so valuable in science today, because I have a good amount of academic freedom. I still try to fight my own limits and push myself to improve my world—the freedom I have allows this.

8) When I revisit the question of “what does success mean to me?” today I find that the answer is to be able to laugh, half-darkly, at myself—at my faults, my strengths, and the profound and the idiotic experiences of my life. I’ve found ways to both take my life seriously and to laugh at myself adrift in it. To see these crisply and then to embrace the whole as “this is me, I can deal with that” brings me a fresh and satisfying feeling.

9) Share your struggles — and successes — with those you trust. It helps. But even just a few years ago, the thought of sharing my career’s story online would have scared me.

10) As scientists we hope for success in our careers to give us some immortality of sorts. What immortality we win is but echoes of our real lives and selves. So I seek to inject some laughter into those echoes while revelling in the amazing moments that make up almost every day. I think it’s funny that I became a scientist and it worked out OK, and I’m grateful to the many that helped; no scientist succeeds on their own.

A major aspect of a traditional career in science is to test the hypothesis that you can succeed in a career as a scientist, which is a voyage of self-discovery, uncovering personal vulnerabilities and strengths. I feel that I am transitioning into whatever the next part of my science career will be; in part, to play a psychopomp role for others taking that voyage.

That’s my story so far. Thanks for sticking with it until the end. Please share your thoughts below.

It’s World Penguin Day! Watch your back though… these penguins aren’t as nice as they seem. But they need us to be nice to them!

Whether you watch a classic GIF like the one above, or a kid-friendly TV/film documentary, you might get the impression that penguins lead carefree, or at least silly or slapstick, lives– happy feet and all that. It works for Hollywood: a Charlie Chaplin comedy relief role to play. And that’s the vision of penguins I grew up with: they were living cartoons to me.

But what’s the reality? Plenty of documentaries, most notably to my mind the recent Attenborough’s “Frozen Earth” episodes or “March of the Penguins” film, have dealt with the darker side to these two-toned, tuxedo-toting antipodeans. And anyone who has experienced penguins in the wild has probably seen those not-so-light facets of penguinity firsthand. On realiizing just how compulsively horny young “hooligan cock” male penguins were, Natural History Museum ornithologist Douglas Russell wrote: ““just the frozen head of the penguin, with self-adhesive white O’s for eye rings, propped upright on wire with a large rock for a body, was sufficient stimulus for males to copulate and deposit sperm on the rock.”

Stomach-Churning Rating: 5/10; some tears may be shed over cute baby penguins and you might choke if you’re a rhea trying to swallow one, but the anatomy shown is mostly skeletal or dessicated. No penguin juices. Except those just mentioned above.

I’m quick to admit, I didn’t know much about penguins until recently. I couldn’t name many species or say much about their behaviour, anatomy or evolutionary history. When I was a graduate student at Berkeley, I was enthused by a now-classic, elegantly simple study (published in 2000) that fellow PhD student Tim Griffin and biomechanist Dr. Rodger Kram conducted on penguin waddling. They found that the waddling gait of penguins isn’t mechanically disadvantageous, as it appears, but rather is a way that they conserve energy while walking. It’s the short legs, instead, that make their gait metabolically expensive, because shorter legs mean that more frequent, costly steps need to be taken, incurring high costs due to rapid firing of leg muscles to support the body. My vicarious enjoyment of Griffin’s & Kram’s research began my scientific introduction to penguins. Fast forward to 2014: I get a crash course in penguinology.

Mostly-fledged Magellanic penguin

That’s what this post is about, and how it brought me in touch with The Existentialist Penguin— the haggard, storm-tossed, predator-harried, starved and bullied wanderer of wastelands.

My personal introduction to penguins over the past year has been initiated by a collaboration with PhD student James Proffitt and long-time colleague Dr. Julia Clarke, both at the University of Texas in Austin. They kindly invited me to collaborate on applying modern biomechanics to the surprisingly excellent fossil record of penguins (Sphenisciformes), among other extant water birds. Before diving into it all, I happened to go to Argentina.

Penguin tries to keep cool in the shade, opening its mouth to shed heat in the autumn sun.

Just before I travelled to Patagonia on unrelated business (to study sauropodomorph dinosaurs!), I did a little googling and came across Punta Tombo reserve, near the city of Trelew that I was visiting (more about that in a future post!). It’s where some 1+ million Magellanic penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) gather every southern summer to breed and fledge before making a long ~5 month swim up to Brazil. I asked my host, Dr. Alejandro Otero, if we might take a day off to visit this spot, where guanacos, rheas and other wildlife were also said to be common, and he basically said “Hell yes!” as he’d never been there. My Flickr photostream gives a big set of my favourite photos from that trip, but here are some others below, to show some of my experiences. We rented a car and took a lovely 90-minute drive south across the Patagonian plains, observing wildlife like tinamous (yes! So exciting for me) as we went. You could get within 1.5m of the penguins according to park rules, and the penguins were very permissive of that!

This jaunty chap was staying put in his burrow while people walked by. We came closer and he kept rotating his head around, staring at us. I first took it as cute juvenile behaviour, but on later observations of penguins realized it was a threat- “My beak is sharp! Stay back, bro, or I’ll glock ya!”

The video below shows a penguin encounter that left me with no doubts that these animals don’t mess around. The smaller penguin escaped, losing its cool burrow and some of its tough hide, too. Indeed, penguins can be remarkable assholes to each other.

With battles like this erupting all around us, where the penguins struggled to find shade in the desert-like inland parts of the park, often hundreds of meters away from the cool ocean, it came as no surprise to find casualties. The juveniles (and some remaining adults; most having left by now while the ~1 year-old juveniles fledge) not only battled, but also fasted, and roasted in the heat as they shed their insulatory fluff for waterproofed streamlining. This poor little flat Spheniscus had been trodden a bit past streamlined:

Near the end of our visit, just after I saw an informative sign about the lesser rhea or “choique” (Pterocnemia/Rhea pennata), we managed to get very close to a rhea and follow it for a while, as penguins stood around in apparent disinterest. I’ll never forget that meeting: two flightless birds, yet adapted to such different lifestyles and habitats. The penguins were in the rhea’s domain; a hot, wind-blown, scree-scoured scrubland on the edge of the fertile ocean.

The choique soon found a dry old hatchling penguin carcass, no meatier than the surrounding thickets, and tried to swallow it. The loss of teeth by its distant ornithurine ancestors proved to be a bad move, because it struggled to get the jerky-like mass through its beak:

That Punta Tombo visit was an experience I’ll never forget. I returned to the UK, abuzz with excitement about penguins. I “got” them now, I felt, at least in a very unscientific, anthropomorphic way. It took the face-to-beak experience to drive that home, more than any emotive film treatment could. Whether enduring Antarctic wintery blasts or unforgivingly hot and dry, burrow-speckled coastal badlands, penguins are buggers with true grit. Survivors, as their >60 million year fossil record attests to. On my return, I delved through my photos of museum specimens to get a better appreciation for penguin anatomy, preparing to also get familiar with that fossil record; all as part of that ongoing work with Proffitt and Clarke. Here’s some of that anatomy:

My first encounter with a penguin in the wild (but not a live one) is probably this specimen washed up on a beach in Uruguay. I’m going with the tentative ID of a juvenile penguin skeleton (short foot; flat wing bones); probably Magellanic. The bevy of vertebrate morphologists investigating dead penguins on this beach during our conference in 2010 will not soon be forgotten!

University Museum of Zoology Cambridge skeleton of a “great penguin” (do not confuse with the great pumpkin!) species of Aptenodytes; either King (patagonicus) or Emperor (forsteri). Characteristic features, in addition to the robust, dense skeleton, include the short neck, flattened but robust wings and scapulae, robust furcula (wishbone), stubby legs (with a big blocky patella) and thin but longish tail (supposedly used to balance with while walking/standing).

I’ll visit some more penguin anatomy in coming images- those photos are just teasers. And they set the stage for me to go back to my one-stop-shopping for awesome ornithological specimens, the Natural History Museum at Tring (images below presented with kind permission from the Natural History Museum, London; but I took the photos), to pick up an assortment of 11 frozen penguins from helpful curator Hein van Grouw! Such as this “gagged” King penguin:

And this handsome Emperor penguin, going through the Equine Imaging Centre’s CT scanner as I do my usual routine of (1) get cool critters, (2) barrage them with radiation to peek inside:

CT scanner monitors as I scan a penguin; mid-torso x-ray slice shown on the right.

Because I love the CT scan images of these penguins so much (their skeletons are awesome and bizarre!), I’ll share the pilot scans of the best ones now:

Calling all penguin experts! What’s up with this? Is that really how much gastrolith (stomach stone; near bottom of image) volume a penguin carries (answer after some literature reading: maybe yes!), or did a museum curator stick rocks up its bum? It seems very caudal in position, and this is consistent with other animals I’ve seen (some below). A paper on this phenomenon and potential role in ballast is here. Another here.

Side view. Nice view of the head at least.

Young juvenile. Nice pose, and lots of anatomy is shown. And check it out- gastroliths?!? In such a young animal– is it even feeding yet? (presumably straight after hatching) And they are relatively big pebbles, too! If I noticed this 5 years ago, it would have been a nice paper to report- first recognition of gastroliths in penguin chicks seems to have been then. Indeed, that study observed some chicks intentionally swallowing stones.

Another youngun; the fluffy one from the photo above. More rocks up its wazoo.

Three wee little chicks, all with stomach stones.

CT reconstruction of adult skeleton. This specimen was gutted and flattened, so the gastroliths are few and scattered. Check out the long tail:

From recent skeletons to fossil ones, penguins have wacky anatomy; they break most of the “rules” of being a proper bird, putting other oddballs like rheas to shame. I can’t ably review the many penguin species we know of, but the ancient Palaeocene penguin Waimanu features prominently in recent scientific discussions of penguin evolution, such as the superb research and blog of Dan Ksepka as well as many workers in the southern hemisphere. I haven’t had a chance to inspect that creature’s bones, but while in Trelew, Argentina, I was very pleased to run into some excellent specimens of a later animal:

Part of the nice skeleton of Palaeospheniscus patagonicus, an Oligocene/Miocene largish penguin; from the MEF collections in Trelew, Argentina and collected nearby. The genus has been known since Ameghino’s description in 1891, and is closely related to living penguins, especially Aptenodytes. It was not a large penguin, but at about 5kg body mass was no slouch as birds go (roughly similar in size to a Magellanic penguin). I also got to see Madrynornis mirandus, a Miocene form.

For me, the diagnostic trait of a penguin skeleton: the very short, tobust tarsometatarsus. From Palaeospheniscus, as above. The great palaeontologist GG Simpson wrote of it: “Despite the innumerable variations in details, the tarsometatarsi, on which all species but P. robustus are based, are quite stereotyped in general structure and leave little doubt that the forms placed here by Ameghino do all belong to a natural group.” A ratio of length to proximal width of >2 is typical of most penguins. Synapomorphy FTW!

From beach skeletons, to mass suffering of landbound birds, to 3D imaging and fossil skeletons, I’ve had quite the immersion in penguinness lately. And through that experience, I’ve been drawn closer to penguins in more ways than one. I’ve been impressed by their adaptability and durability. In some ways, penguins’ adaptations to harsh freezing winters in wastelands also aid them to survive harsh baking summers in dry badlands.

Yes, those badlands are still coastal, and penguins can still drink the saltwater and excrete salt via their supraorbital glands, but those penguins in Punta Tombo were not having a keg party. They were clearly enduring some serious discomfort, and not all making it through the ordeal. I watched silently along with other penguins as one penguin lay prone in an awkward pose on a bleached-white stretch of hardpan soil, while one flipper meekly raised, then flopped down. It was not long for this world, and there was a host of large scavengers around ready to make the most of that, while penguin-eating giant petrels (a sister group to penguins) wheeled overhead.

Waddlers of the wastes

While penguins still spend most of their lives at sea, they retain a sometimes astonishing array of behaviours they use on land: burrowing, hopping/jumping, costly short-legged (but efficiently waddling) walking, and perhaps more that we haven’t yet discovered! Their unique anatomy reflects a compromise between all these factors, and we’re fortunate to have knowledge of their fossil record that shows a lot of detail on how they evolved it all. While penguins are a highly aquatic species, they show how aquatic and terrestrial adaptations can coexist in harmony; it’s not just a black-or-white issue. But with climate change in progress, the ~18 species of penguins have some rapidly altering challenges to adapt to, or go the way of Waimanu. This is a critical Kierkegaardian moment for The Existentialist Penguin.

I raise a glass in toast to that versatile, resilient, gravel-gizzarded Existentialist Penguin! May it persevere all the troubles our ever-changing world throws at it, as it has done since the Palaeocene. And may we draw inspiration from its tenacity, to face our own troubles, together on this crazy spinning globe!